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Discovering Discovery Campaigns

In Q4 2018 Google opened a new beta, introducing a new campaign type called “Discovery Campaigns.” Discovery campaigns are designed with the ever changing digital landscape in mind, allowing advertisers to “Create visually rich, personalized ads that drive engagement with their brand across YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and more.” This follows along my suspicions that Google will one day rely entirely on user data to serve ads to users instead of keywords. Using Discovery Campaigns, Google’s machine learning capabilities can hypertarget customized ads to users based on their online activity on Google and its partner sites. As advertisers, it means we have less control over building campaigns and give more control to Google’s black box of algorithms. The benefit is that it gives account managers more time to ponder over other aspects of marketing strategy. In essence, Google wants to predict what you want, when you want it – and eventually, before you want it. Four15 Digital was granted exclusive access to this beta and immediately began testing on some of our larger clients. So far, our results have been positive.  Almost 2 weeks since launching Discovery campaigns,we have started to see potential in this new campaign.  Creating a Discovery Campaign Once you are in the beta, from the homescreen, discovery campaigns can be found under the 3 standard campaign types: To create a new campaign, click on the “+” button. You’ll find the standard campaign and ad group settings just as you would trying to create other campaign types. Note, Discovery campaigns are only available for the following goal options:  Once you’ve created your campaign you will be prompted to create your ad – Discovery Carousel or Discovery. Both ad types require a headline, description, business name, and at least 1 card. A card consists of 2 images, a headline, a final card URL, and a call to action text. The difference between the 2 ad types is that the carousel can handle up to 10 cards. Below are some examples of ads. At the time of writing this article, there’s a note in the UI stating, “Ads are currently only available on computers via Gmail until more support is added.” Therefore, you might want to skip out on this campaign type entirely if your mobile page isn’t up to snuff. And the results back that statement up as most views come from mobile and tablets.So far, our performance has been good, but we need more time before we can decisively give an opinion on Discovery Ads. We’ve requested to be whitelisted for more of our accounts since our initial findings are promising. One thing to note is that we did notice volume drop off after the initial week – which is unfortunate because the initial week did very well in terms of conversions. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on any new findings. Stay up to date with any new findings by following Four15 Digital on LinkedIn.

Evolving your strategy – Using the tCPA Smart bidding approach

Have you heard about machine learning recently? Only a dozen times a day?  Here is a practical take on using machine learning in managing your toughest and most important task as an SEM manager. At Four15 Digital we have many medium, small, and large accounts taking advantage of the smart bidding approach powered by Google, which is an advanced form of machine learning algorithms. It uses data at a scale to help determine different bid amounts for each user and query to impact conversions or conversion value, factoring in a wider range of signals that impact performance than a single person or team could compute.  In other words, the algorithm takes into account auction-level signals. I know that experienced SEM managers can surmise intent from a keyword. In most cases we can. It’s a skill one develops with years of looking at the Keyword Tool projections. Keyword intent is a mighty signal, no question about it.  But what if a keyword that always converts also always fails to convert when certain conditions are met? I don’t presume to demystify the workings of Google algorithm, but the way to understand it is to consider vast amounts of data processed to learn which signals are present more often than not when a conversion occurs. Correlation and “hopefully” some causation analytics is also involved to determine the signals that matter, how much they matter, and whether or not they cause the conversion, or just correlate with it. So if someone who searched for that [insert your always converting keyword] is also exhibiting geographic or behavioral signals suggesting that they represent the case of a non-converter, using a smart bidding technique will result in a lower bid for that auction. Smart bidding is in essence a way to take more into account when bidding on an auction than the keyword itself. But honestly, smart bidding algorithm works well coupled with standard knowledge of SEM, as it alleviates the need to fine tune the bids. You still have to select the right keywords, write ads and extensions, point to conversion-optimized pages, ensure correct tracking, and do the work of an SEM manager, but you won’t need to fine tune your bids. There are several smart bidding techniques available today (aug 2019): Target CPA approach is the one that I’d like to discuss given how much success we’re having using that approach. It is an approach that allowed us to improve account performance for a variety of performance-based accounts. The way to migrate to tCPA is quite easy actually. After you’ve accomplished the heavy lifting of building a campaign and accumulated enough data for it, your account will push automatic recommendations suggesting that you transition to a tCPA bidding like this: The above is one way to learn what the system is suggesting in terms of a CPA target. Another way would be to navigate to each of your campaigns’ settings to retrieve information on the suggested tCPA. For instance, as I see my campaign’s settings, they look like this: Clicking on the blue link in the image above, I see the following shortcut to applying the recommendation that pops up: Clicking on the down arrow on the right hand side will take you to switching to tCPA the long way. First you’d click to select the bid strategy directly: Then this: At this point you can make a few strategic decisions that will make or break your approach. For starters I would not edit the recommended target bid too much. I would either not switch at all or switch with the recommended target.  If you have many campaigns already running on tCPA in the account, then I would only edit the target slightly for the first transition. If you recommended target CPA is $131, I wouldn’t slash it in half to lower it, make it $10 lower at most. However, there is a very important point to consider at this point. Your algorithm is suggesting a target based on average. I’ve seen many campaigns that have suggested a very high target, but delivered at a lower CPA, and quickly self-perfected to improve the CPA even further. This is the time to trust the algorithm and take it’s suggestion.  This is also the time to watch closely.  Franky, I haven’t seen too many problems with the tCPA approach. It is indeed well designed to decipher the signals that matter and to self-perfect with more data it accumulates. Have you had issues with your tCPA approach? How about success? Share with us below!

Read This Before Creating Custom Audiences in Google Ads

Within the Google Ads platform you can create audiences of users based on factors such as website visitors, app users, YouTube users, and customer lists. These are useful because they allow you to target/exclude users so that your ads target only those users you intend to reach. In this article I’ll be explaining the lists I usually make: customer list and website visitor-based audience lists. Hopefully you can use these tips to help you find success in your digital marketing efforts. Creating Customer List and Website Visitors Audiences To create a customer list audience, from the Google Ads UI first click on “Tools” at the upper-right corner then click the blue “+” and finally “Customer List”. From here, you’ll be able to create your audience based on different types of customer data – Email, Phone, First and Last Name, Country Zip, User IDs and Mobile Device IDs.  The guidelines for uploading your list can be found here.  Since Google tries matching the data you’ve entered to users in their database, not all of the individuals will be matched and the final audience size will vary. We typically see a 40-60% match-rate with Google for Customer lists. Website Visitor Audiences – additional detail While creating lists based on website visitors (URLs) I recently stumbled upon some interesting warnings that you can hopefully avoid: With your audience list uploaded you can then apply that list to your campaigns for targeting! Now you’re ready to create your own customer lists quickly with minimum hassle. For more tips on improving your digital marketing efforts. Check out the rest of our blogs.

Custom Rules: How To Turn Google Ads Editor Into a Helpful Assistant

One of the most useful tools of Google Ads is the Google Ads Editor. Editor’s built-in and custom rules make your Google Ads Editor work harder for you. They change its nature from a passive database interface to an active assistant that can inform how efficient you are being with your accounts. In the video below we’ve reviewed the way to set up a custom rule, which can alert you that something in your account is not running as smoothly as you’d like it. For instance, I describe how to put together a custom rule that will alert you to the fact that your Display campaigns are running with targeting optimization on. It is not something that I want to happen in the account that I am looking at, so I demonstrate how quick and easy it is to set the rule that will scan your accounts/campaigns/ad groups/etc any time you are in the editor and alert you to the errors if they satisfy your violation criteria. Here is the new version of the custom rule video:  Additionally, In the following screencast I go over the built-in Google Ads Editor rules. Why they may be important for your accounts and the way you could use those pre-built rules. If you have a favorite custom rule you’d like to share with us, please share below! Additionally, we can answer any questions you might have for us regarding the rules and SEM questions in general.

How to Quickly Find Duplicate Keywords Using Google Ads Editor

If you have ever managed large, complex accounts, you might find that it is easy to start second-guessing your keyword additions since it’s quite possible they already exist elsewhere in your account.  It may not bother you at first, but over time you could build up a large collection of duplicate keywords, especially if you have multiple people working in a single account. Duplicate keywords are definitely not considered ‘best practice’ for a number of reasons: In order to quickly identify duplicates, I recommend using  Google Ads Editor to locate them.  The steps are rather easy: first open your Editor and navigate over to “Tools.” Once there, you’ll see in the drop down menu – it will provide an option “Find duplicate keywords,” go ahead and click on that: Once there, you’re able to customize how you would like to look for duplicates. These parameters you can choose from are as follows below: Once you’re ready, you can click “Find duplicate keywords” and you’ll be given a screen that looks like this one below. To help you quickly determine which keywords you would like to keep and which you would like to remove you can add columns like quality score and CTR. Hopefully, this tool helps you in eliminating duplicate keywords quickly! Not the most exciting project exactly, but it will only save you from future headaches down the line.